hey all you audio experts of the forum.i've been interested in lossless music for a long time and i got almost all of my knowledge about it from this forum.i have an issue that i'm trying to figure out, and i've searched everywhere possible for info about it but i couldn't find any.so you guys are my last resort, i hope you can help...here's the issue :

i download many lossless albums all the time (WAV,APE,ALAC,FLAC), but i only keep to myself those few songs (if any) from each album, those songs that i liked the most.most albums are ripped with gap detection so they begin with silence and end with silence, but there are some albums that don't, albums such as :

mixed albums (where the songs dissolve into each other)live albums (where the tracks begin and end with the audience clapping or shouting)one track albums (where there are no gaps or pauses between tracks)

i find it very annoying to listen to songs that comes from albums like the above, so i fix it using audacity, i fade in, and fade out, add some silence if necessary (using the "generate - silence" option), the thing is i can't help thinking maybe i am turning this perfect lossless file into a lossy one, and by doing so actually creating a fake lossless (since i'm always exporting as flac), my ears can't hear any difference, but still, you know way more than i do about these things.

so please tell me, does the "fade in / fade out / add silence" processes make a lossless file lossy?

sorry if my english is bad, i hope it's understandable, and if you find any mistakes please correct me.

wow, you guys are quick hehehewell, thank you all for answering, and i sure have learned a lot, but something is still unclear to me.on the one hand, i understand from halb27 & extrabigmehdi that everything i didn't touch (aka everything not faded) will remain the same, which is perfect for me, and extrabigmehdi is right, i don't care about the fact that whatever's been faded cannot be recovered, it's only 1 second of the entire song in most cases.but then there's this dithering thing that andrew_berge is talking about, i never heard of it, and if it modifies the entire file than even the parts i didn't mess with are becoming different, which is a big problem for me, could you please explain to me what is this dithering thing, and how can i change it so that it won't change the file completely?oh, and Garf, if you meant a portable player, i don't have one, i'm just listening to the music in my PC.and if you meant a media playing software like winamp and such, i don't realy like it, since it's only cosmetic.i also want to make sure that other people who aren't as techy as i am can enjoy these songs (i share them to many people) without having to download any extra software for it.

If you have recorded in 16-bit and are only doing simple editing (cut, delete, paste, trim...) and not doing any processing (amplify, equalize, frequency filter....) then for highest accuracy dither can be set to "none". In this case, because there are no 32-bit operations prior to export there is no benefit to using dither. Exporting a 16-bit track to 16-bit with dither set to "none" will be lossless. The same applies if exporting from a 24-bit track to an uncompressed 24-bit file format with dither disabled.

The setting can be changed in the Preferences, under "Quality", as halb27 has already said.